A Life Without Hope

By the time I decided I might need some help, I was fifty years old. Thirty-five of those years had been drunken years. Dozens of jails had held me, as well as two state prisons, two mental hospitals, and over fifty detox centers. My most terrible years weren't the institutions but years and years of dying on half the big skidrows in America. With no job skills, no work history, and only a basic high school education, I saw my life as a life without any hope at all--drunk or sober. I didn't want to give up the booze, because it was my only solution to a life without hope. But it too had finally failed me.